Still, nothing I’d heard or read about sex explained what the two of them felt as Ilse rested her cheek against Rick’s shoulder. I remembered Margaret saying that sex meant not having to think. Maybe that was it. Maybe their minds had shut down, canceling out Ilse’s husband, Rick’s past, the war, the Germans heading for Paris. What was a war compared to the touch of his lips against her forehead?
When Ilse told Rick to kiss her as if for the last time, Aaron flinched. Maybe Margaret used to say that. And he had kissed her for the last time, though he hadn’t known it, no more than Rick suspected that Ilse would stand him up at the station in the pounding rain.
Aaron got a roll of toilet paper and plunked it in my lap. I tore ragged scraps and blotted my eyes until soggy wads littered the couch. This wasn’t how I’d imagined our afternoon, but I didn’t care. It didn’t matter if my face looked like a cranberry muffin.
“So much for our experiment,” Aaron said.
“No, really,” I said. “I’m fine.”
I knew how the story would end. Heroic Rick would send Ilse off to live with a man she didn’t love but whose work was more important than running a nightclub. The plane spun its propellers, and the lovers’ one chance at happiness took off into the night sky. It had nothing to do with Aaron and me. Rick and Ilse were heart-broken, but alive. Only my sister was dead. I glanced at Aaron. I could have sworn he was thinking the same thing.
He said, “I won’t even bother telling you to cheer up.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that.”
The silence that fell seemed restful, as if something had been settled, as if more had happened than the two of us watching a film. If Aaron hadn’t been there, I could have fallen asleep. I wondered if I could trust him to wake me in time to go home.
After a while, Aaron said, “But I do have something that might help cheer you up. Something you should try.”
I didn’t like the sound of something or cheer or, for that matter, try. Drugs, I thought. Or alcohol. I wished this weren’t happening. I could say no to Aaron. He wouldn’t try to persuade me, or make fun of me if I refused. He didn’t want to get me drunk or stoned. He truly wanted to help. Aaron had loved Margaret, and I was her grieving sibling. But how babyish it would make me seem. No, thanks, I don’t drink or smoke. I’m not brave and sophisticated like my sister. I would never have cried in front of him if I’d known it would lead to this.
He said, “It’s in my room. In the house. I’ll be back in a second.”
Aaron was gone for long enough for me to have a complicated fantasy about him rolling a joint and getting busted by his parents. What if he’d run into them, and they’d insisted he have lunch or do some household chore, and he couldn’t tell them I was in the cabin? His poor sad mom with her grief book! Her worry would spike when she learned that her son was spending the afternoon with me.
Could Aaron have forgotten me? It seemed possible, if unlikely. How strange that being abandoned made me feel trapped instead of released. I needed to plot my escape route, even though it was clear I could simply walk out the door. The truth was, I was looking for an excuse to go through Aaron’s stuff. I knew it wasn’t right, but it might be my only chance to find out more about him and about Margaret, maybe.
I looked out the window. No Aaron. I drifted into the studio, sidestepping the bright dots of color. All over the spattered walls were the bare, rectangular ghosts of pictures. The floor was littered with scraps of magazine pages and drawings, here a fleshy pink arm torn from a Renaissance painting, there a piece of fruit from a still life.
I picked up two halves of a picture and joined the ragged edges. A nude woman reclined on a rumpled bed, turned away so all you could see was her reddish hair and her long, dimpled, creamy back and ass. Propped up on one elbow, she gazed at her rosy face in a gilded mirror held by a fat, naked baby. I longed to run my finger along her spine, to caress each swell and dip.
A tingling ran from my fingertips to some terminal deep inside me. I was so astonished I squealed and dropped both scraps. The buzz subsided, replaced by shame at the perversion and total gayness of practically jerking off over a naked woman in my sister’s boyfriend’s cabin. Was that what Aaron used to do? Did he think the painting was sexy? The fact that it was torn somehow made it more exciting. Aaron had touched it, and ripped it up, and—
Aaron came up behind me. First I was glad to see him, then nervous, then happy, then frightened. Both halves of the picture had landed faceup on the floor.
“Carracci,” Aaron said. “His women always look like gymbuffed guys in drag.”
Now that he mentioned it, the goddess turned, before my eyes, into a naked linebacker with a woman’s head. I felt a little easier about the feeling I’d gotten from the painting.
“Why did you rip it up?”
“I got tired of it,” said Aaron. “Come on.” As he led me back into the main room, I saw that he was carrying a delicate indigo bottle. A vintage pharmaceutical vial full of . . . what? LSD. Liquid morphine. Nightmares and permanent madness. I felt dizzy, a little sick. I sank into the couch.
Aaron unscrewed the cap, and we stared at the bottle as if a genie might fly out.
“Aromatherapy,” he said. “It helps. Don’t look at me like that. I wouldn’t have believed it, either, Nico, but these days I’ll give anything a shot. I don’t know why it works, but it does—”
I must have looked as blank as I felt. Was I supposed to sniff it?
“Put it on,” Aaron said.
How thoughtful of him to bring me perfume with healing powers, and how glad I was that it wasn’t an illegal substance. I sniffed. It smelled familiar. Like baking cookies. Like Margaret.
“Vanilla extract,” Aaron said. “Your sister loved it.”
“It smells like her,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
I said, “She told me she didn’t use perfume.” When had she started smelling like that? Could it have been around the time she started going out with Aaron?
“It’s not perfume,” said Aaron. “It’s a natural oil.”
“Where did you get this?” I said. “The grocery store? I mean, is this like supermarket vanilla extract?”
“I got it on the Internet. It’s the kind your sister used.”
It shocked me that Margaret’s essence was something you could order online, like a fake Rolex or a pill to enlarge your penis. Maybe the bottle did hold a drug, some kind of vapor or ether. Maybe crying over the film had shook me loose from my bedrock self. Or maybe I was worn out by my romantic interlude with the ripped-up painting.
“Go ahead. Put it on.”
The easiest thing is to do what you’re told. I tipped the oil onto my finger and dabbed it behind my ears. The cookie smell enveloped me. I sensed Margaret’s presence nearby. Aaron put his head near mine, and kept it there, without moving or speaking, until his breathing synchronized with mine. Part of me thought it was creepy, Aaron sitting too close on the couch and inhaling my dead sister. And part of me truly loved it. Air flowed into and out of my lungs, each breath easier than the last. I’d almost forget that Aaron was there. Then I would remember.
“God,” Aaron said. “That smells so good. It will calm you down, I promise.”
I said, “I should probably be getting back.” But I didn’t move. I felt as if the scent of vanilla was only in that room, and not on my skin, which meant that I could have taken it with me. I wanted to stay where it was.
“You can have it,” Aaron said. “Take the bottle home.”
“Thanks so much,” I said. “That’s so nice of you. But I couldn’t. Keep it.”
“Take it.” Aaron pressed the bottle into my hand, and curled my fingers around it.
“All right,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Aaron said. “Anyway, this was . . .” He stopped. This was fun? This was great? There were no words for what this was. “We could do this again. Drive around. Come here. Hang out.”<
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“Sure,” I said. “I’d like that.”
He drove me to the end of my road, and I took my bike out of his van and rode home.
Twilight was approaching. The air was moist and fragrant. From the corner of my eye, I saw dark shapes stir in the woods. I imagined they smelled the vanilla oil, and that it made them back off. I remembered Margaret talking about how the spirits of the dead emerged from the lake at twilight to make their party plans. I wondered if she was among them, if she had a date for the evening.
I pedaled hard up the driveway, dropped my bike on the lawn, and hurried inside.
“I’m home,” I yelled up the stairs. A feather of greeting floated down from my mother’s study. I went to my room. I didn’t want to see my parents, and I didn’t want them to see a red-eyed, puffy-faced Nico who smelled like her older sister.
AFTER THAT, AARON AND I MET ON SUNDAYS, AND SOMETIMES in the mornings before I went to have lunch with my father. We always met in the same spot. Aaron got there early, parked parallel to the road, and opened the tailgate so he could sit in the back, in the sun.
Mostly, we drove around in the van. He knew so many beautiful places I never knew existed. Once he stopped at a turnoff, and we hiked into the woods, and he showed me a grove of foxgloves, pink, yellow, and purple, six feet tall, standing at attention like a sentinel troupe of space invaders. Another day, we found a patch of wild strawberries so thick we ate until I felt tipsy from the fermented fruit. Anyway, that’s what I pretended. Then we sat at the edge of the field, enjoying front-row seats at a duel between two hummingbirds who fought until one stabbed his beak into the other’s neck, and the loser plunged into the brambles. Even though it was awful, I felt lucky to be there, as if nature had staged the death match expressly for Aaron and me.
He took me to a part of the forest where someone had piled a mound of stones. He said it was a druid grave, from centuries before Columbus. It was something Margaret would have said. Probably it wasn’t true, but I didn’t correct him. I didn’t want him to think that he and Margaret had been the only poets.
He would never have done something corny, like whipping out a drawing pad and sketching. But every so often, he’d look at a mountain or a tree as if he was framing it in his mind, and I’d wonder if he was figuring out how it might work as a painting.
One Sunday afternoon, we were parked at Miller’s Point, watching two high-flying hawks perform their suicide-courtship air ballet.
Aaron said, “You know, this is the first time I’ve thought about making art since . . .” That was our code-speak for Margaret’s death: the silence that came after since.
I was so happy that being with me might have made Aaron start thinking about painting. He’d promised we’d help each other, but I’d never believed I could help him. I remembered the Senior Show, how he’d crossed in front of the screen and, for a second, Mirror Lake had rippled over his handsome face.
The van smelled of vanilla. Aaron liked me to wear the aroma-therapy oil. We never had to discuss it.
At first, I’d been careful to scrub it off the minute I got home. But after I forgot a few times, and my parents didn’t ask, I started wearing it constantly, dabbing it on to help me sleep and then help me get up in the morning. I was surprised, then annoyed, that my parents didn’t notice. What if the smell was alcohol? They would have registered that. For all the fuss they made about their only Remaining Child, I’d begun to feel dangerously cut loose and out there, on my own.
Putting on the oil became an addictive secret rite. Dabbing it on in the steamy bathroom, I thought, This is how cutters begin. Girls who do painful things to themselves because they can’t resist. The little blue vial could have contained LSD or Rohypnol. Why wasn’t vanilla extract included in Oficer Prozak’s DARE teacher-training guide?
Often, as we rode around, Aaron and I listened to music. The sweet, slow phrases flowed over us like the breeze streaming in the windows. Sometimes Aaron would replay a track and point out some smoky Lester Young lick, or how Elvis Costello communicated more than he could make himself say. Once, when Aaron played Robert Johnson, I said, “He makes the blues sound like something spilling out of him instead of anything he’s doing.”
Of course, we were quoting Margaret. We didn’t need to say that, either. It was sad, the way the music was sad, but not so sad that we couldn’t stand it.
My parents must have thought I was spending a lot of time at Elaine ’s. Or they would have thought that, if they thought about anything much beyond putting one foot in front of the other.
One night, at dinner, my mother announced that she and Sally had paid another visit to Dr. Viscott.
“Please don’t say you’re looking for closure,” my father said. “It’d be like channeling Sally.”
My mother said, “He gave me another prescription.”
Dad said, “He’s a pediatrician.”
Mom said, “He listens to me. He wants to help. He says it’s the least he can do.”
She stood up from the table and lurched toward the bathroom. She didn’t bother closing the door.
I said, “Sounds like Mom’s throwing up.”
“So I hear,” said Dad. “I don’t think it was something I cooked, do you, Nico? You’re feeling okay, right?”
Neither of us moved. Finally, Dad said, “I guess Mom had better start watching that extra glass of wine before dinner.”
I said, “You guys didn’t have any wine.”
After a while he said, “Listen, Nico. We just have to get through this. All we have to do is survive and make it to the end of the summer.”
“And then?” I said.
He thought a moment. “Then we have to get through the fall.”
MY FATHER WAS WORKING HARD ON HIS BOOK. That was all he did now, at the store. He’d started going in earlier, when Elaine was still there. The more time he spent around Elaine, the more I worried she’d say something to make him suspect I wasn’t at her house as much as I pretended.
In fact I often dropped by Elaine’s so she wouldn’t be totally lying. We drank iced coffee and talked about movies, about Tycho, about Tycho’s dad’s photographic recall for every mistake Elaine ever made and his chronic forgetfulness about child support. It was like having a friend again, except that we never discussed the things I needed to talk about—Margaret, my parents, Aaron.
Ever since I’d started hanging out with Elaine, I’d begun ordering iced coffee at the Nibble Corner. The first time, my father stared at my coffee glass as if it were a clue to some mysterious grown-up life I was leading without him in it. Then he said, “You know, I think I’ll have one of those, too.” I stirred three spoonfuls of sugar in mine, and my father did the same.
It became another ritual. We ordered coffee every day and fed our addiction to the caffeine and the sugar and the slow stirring in circles. All that sugar should have made me stop losing weight. But I kept on getting thinner and looking more like Margaret. Sometimes, passing a store window, I’d catch a glimpse of her, and my knees would go weak—and then she’d turn back into me.
One afternoon, my father and I were finishing our coffee when he told me that he was almost sure he’d found out exactly where the Millerites had gone to be raptured. Apparently, our tiny local public library had a cache of crumbling documents from the year when the cult gathered on the hillside.
“For a long time afterward,” my father said, “it was known as Disappointment Hill, though I don’t think they call it that now.”
“Not great for real estate,” I said. “Where is it?”
The map Dad sketched on a napkin passed dangerously near Miller’s Point, then turned off in another direction. I was so relieved I said, “Great!”
My father reached across the table and squeezed my arm.
“That’s my Nico,” he said. “Let’s do it. Let’s take a ride tomorrow morning. Let’s find the field where they waited.”
I was supposed to meet Aaron tomorrow morning.
“What’s that going to tell us?” I said. “It’s probably someone’s front yard.”
“So what?” my father said. “It can’t hurt to check it out. Let’s see how it feels to be there.”
“How what feels?”
“Who knows?” said Dad. “Some leftover remnant of all that hope and disappointment. Some aura that attached itself to the place and is still hovering in the air.”
“Aura?” I said. “Really, Dad, why not just get out the ouija board?”
My father stared at me, confused. Perhaps my saying ouija board had reminded him of Margaret, or maybe my thinking about Margaret had made him think of Margaret. All the excitement leached out of his face and left him staring at the milky tracks on his coffee glass as if they were tea leaves he was trying to read.
I said, “Actually, that sounds like fun. It’s a fantastic idea.”
Ten
HERE WAS AN OBVIOUS QUESTION I’D NEVER ASKED MYSELF before: How could you do the same thing with two different people, and it could be heaven with one person, and hell when you did it with the other? I loved driving around with Aaron. Our rides never lasted long enough. But as my father and I set out on our Great Disappointment road trip, every mile took forever. The houses were shabby, the barns half collapsed, the countryside depressed me.
Dad said, “Did I ever tell you that Miller got most of his information from the book of Daniel? It’s an eschatologist’s gold mine. A grab bag of prophetic dreams and exploding galaxies, tornadoes, hungry monsters rising out of a sea—”
“You told me,” I said. Every time he said “Miller,” I thought, Miller’s Point. I felt guilty for not mentioning it in case, with all his poking around in the library, he’d missed some crucial connection between Aaron’s panorama spot and his doomsday landing strip. But if I told him, I might have to explain how I knew.
I couldn’t believe that I, a scientifically minded person, was accompanying my father on a mission to channel the ghosts of dead fanatics. Margaret and I had made fun of Dad, but the truth was, we’d both liked the part of him that would drive to the middle of nowhere on the chance of finding some leftover ectoplasm. Once, en route to visit Gran Bradley—his mom, our only surviving grandparent, who lived with a caretaker in her rambling house in Maine—Dad detoured an hour out of our way because a Goldengrove customer had told him about a convenience-store owner who would show you her treasure, the world’s smallest cathedral. The store was shut. Dad knocked on the door. We never saw the tiny cathedral. The romance of Dad’s disappointment was a major part of the drama.
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